Yes, People Do Say “Bing It” — Barely

It was around 2001 when I first really noticed the transition from people talking about “searching” for something to “Googling” information. As Google’s brand grew, it also became a synonym for search engines in general. That’s something Bing, coming up on its first birthday, has hoped to challenge. Good news. Yes, people are saying “Bing It.” That’s a huge accomplishment. Bad news: many, many more continue to say “Google It.”

Binging It On Twitter

I came across people saying “Bing It” on Twitter recently. It’s easy to find real-life examples. Here are are some from the past few days, from a search on Bing It:

shwaldman @Tara_Costa – They do! You can find seat belts all over the place. They are harnesses that strap into the car seat belt. Bing It. Google It.

treefroggirl @StuartYoung you know how to use a search engine… Bing it!

More Still Googling It

Of course, many more people say “Google It” Here’s a search from Twitter on that phrase:

The first four tweets, all less than 10 minutes old, have references to people saying “Google It.” In the course of an hour, there were roughly about 80 uses of the phrase. In contrast, someone says “Bing It” maybe once or twice per hour, if even that much.

Still, Bing deserves some credit. Even if only a few people are saying to “Bing It,” that’s a big achievement from what many, including myself, would have believed possible a year ago.

Gossip Girl & Bing

How’s it happening? In part, some product placement is probably helping. One recent example is Bing’s deal with Gossip Girl that has characters making references to Bing. That’s getting the phrase out, even if some viewers aren’t buying it:

In this one, someone tells her friend to “Bing it!” To her friend’s disbelief, she explains further that she tried Bing for a week and liked it — getting her friend to say she’ll give Bing a try.

(FYI, one of the two parties in that conversation has protected their tweets, but they’re viewable through search on both Twitter Search and Google. This is probably due to her having recently changed her settings. Tweets made before shifting to protected status remain public).

Gotchas

A couple of last points, for those who may want to do their own searches of people saying “Bing it” or “Google it” in Twitter.

One issue is that there are plenty of examples I found where people said “bing it” when they meant to tell someone to “bring it.” That will skew things for anyone who tries to reference count.

Google’s Twitter Archive maddeningly also considers the word “it’s” to be the same as “it.” Look here:

In that case, I did a search for +”google it” — which is supposed to cause Google to return only content that has the exact phrase “google it” within that content. Instead, I got matches for things like:

#google, it

[Google]: It’s

Google — it

Google! It’s

Punctuation isn’t being counted, which I can understand, even if it is annoying. But matching “it” to be “it’s” makes no sense.

When Did “Google It” First Emerge?

Finally, when did people first start talking about how they were going to “Google It?” That’s really tough. Using Google News Archive Search, I tried to find the earliest news article with a mention. Unfortunately, some of the same punctuation issues mentioned above also produced some false positives — among other issues. But by the mid-2000s, there are plenty of solid references.